Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Gupta

So this is where we have to understand that the basic risk is really small.

So the risk of having a child with autism is somewhere between one in about 33, 3%, all the way down to one in about 500.

So let's say that the baseline risk of autism is about 0.5%, right?

So one out of every 200 kids, I'm just averaging different epidemiologic studies, okay?

So you basically have a chance of one out of 200 to end up with a child on the spectrum.

So even if we double that risk from 0.5% to a whopping 1%, the actual risk is still pretty small, right?

Are you doubling your odds?

Yeah, but the odds are still really, really low.

If you sort of think about it, like if I were to double your odds of winning the lottery, what is the likelihood that you would win the lottery?

It's still really, really small.

And these kinds of statistical things are really hard to understand.

Our brain is not designed to understand these kinds of statistics.

And this is why some of these things like Tylenol increases the risk of autism by 20%, 30%, 50%, 100% is actually a very small contributor to the overall risk of being on the spectrum.

And so now I think we're getting a picture of what causes autism.

So here's the scary thing.

I don't think that the stuff in the White House statement is wrong.

I think that there are a lot of studies that show an association between Tylenol and autism.

I think the real danger is that it's woefully incomplete.

For example, one study from about one year ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association did a deeper dive into the link between autism and Tylenol.

And what they found doing something called a sibling analysis of 185,000